• ISBN13: 9780199475032
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: Sociology and Anthropology
• Publisher: Oxford UP
• Publisher Imprint: Oxford UP
• Publication Date: June 17, 2018
• Pages: 320
• Original Price: INR 1195.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 520 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): General

The Refugee Woman examines the Partition of 1947 by engaging with the cultural imagination of the ‘refugee woman’ in West Bengal, particularly in three significant texts of the Partition of Bengal—Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara; and two novels, Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga, Opar Ganga and Sabitri Roy’s Swaralipi. It shows that the figure of the refugee woman, animated by the history of the political left and refugee movements and shaped by powerful cultural narratives, can contest and reconstitute the very political imagination of ‘woman’ that emerged through the long history of dominant cultural nationalisms. The reading it offers elucidates some of the complexities of nationalist, communal and communist gender-politics of a key period in post-independence Bengal.

Paulomi Chakraborty is Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in IIT Bombay. She completed her PhD from University of Alberta, Canada. Her publications include a research article in English Studies in Canada (2004), a book chapter in Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement, edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia (New Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2007), and book reviews in Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review and Economic and Political Weekly. She has, by invitation, also contributed book chapters to Handbook on Gender in South Asia, edited by Leela Fernandez, and Being Bengali: At Home and in the World, edited by Mridula Chakraborty (both Routledge UK, 2014). Among her research interests are the Partition of 1947, the 'turbulent 40s' in Bengal, and cultures of the political left, often focusing on gender.